In this guest post, Priscilla Ferreira, Livia Vidal, Gizele Martin, Tuwilê J.K. Braga, W. Jamaal Wright, Adam Bledsoe, and Yousuf Al-Bulushi describe their research on “Global Black Geographies: Racial Capitalism and Black Urban Experiences”, which was supported by a Seminar Series Awards grant from the USF.
“Make a life, and the living will follow,” she said while seated in a front yard that doubles as an organizing space. Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Ruthie) was in Pedra de Guaratiba, a distal neighborhood within the city of Rio de Janeiro, to attend a community meeting at Mulheres de Pedra. Mulheres de Pedra is a Black women-led community organization formed in 2001. Seated comfortably among a circle of interlocutors, Ruthie quoted the noted organizer, Ella Baker. Her point was this, the life we want begins with an intention and action. The future we want, for her, that is a world in which we are making abolition, begins similarly. Gilmore was in Brazil in support of the Portuguese translation of her text, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.[1] Pedra de Guaratiba was the preface to her four-part Brazilian book tour: Rio de Janeiro (Rio), São Luís do Maranhão, São Paulo, and Salvador. Though her formal invitation was on behalf of Bruno Xavier of Igrak Niga Press, the independent press that translated and published her book, Ruthie’s presence was organized by several grassroots collectives that hosted her in each of the four cities. Scholars at four different universities were also involved in organizing her journey, including Dr. Rita Montezuma and her colleagues in the Department of Geography at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro.
Ruthie visited a number of cultural spaces. The first meeting was at the Terreiro Ylê Asè Egi Omim and its Yalorixá, Yá Wanda de Araújo. Organized by Fransérgio Goulart, Coordinator for the Iniciativa Direito à Memória e Justiça Racial, there Ruthie met with some mothers of victims of state violence. The next day, she visited Casa das Pretas, where she met with a network of Afro-Brazilian geographers. An unspoken contributor to Ruthie’s visit, and in particularly her connection with Afro-Brazilian geographers, was the conference we held in June of 2022. That summer we organized the first iteration of Global Black Geographies: Racial Capitalism and Black Urban Experiences (Global Black Geographies)[2] in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This diasporic, bi-hemispheric, and bilingual gathering was the culmination of two years of applications, edits, virtual and in-person meetings in the U.S. and Brazil. Moreover, it was made possible by a Seminar Series Award from the Urban Studies Foundation USF-SSA-210203.
The co-conveners, which consisted of professors and community organizers, met monthly in preparation for this event. Intentionally, we scheduled the conference to be held in the summer before Brazil’s presidential elections. Former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) was running against Jair Bolsonaro, the country’s conservative incumbent. Throughout certain sections of the city, support for Lula was palpable. Almost nightly, while out at restaurants and bars, we witnessed people erupt into chants and songs. At times, our attendees would join the chorus, becoming a part of the city’s rapturous left political affect.
From June 2 to 6, 2022, this international conference convened an average of 80 participants daily in academic and grassroots spaces. The core team involved conference participants from five local and international universities, undergraduate and graduate students, and representatives/speakers from fifteen local grassroots organizations. To help attendees grasp a sense of the scale of political struggles in the city and state of Rio, field outings were taken to a variety of locations: the Favela da Maré/Museu de Maré, an MST encampment, the Terreiro de Candomblé de Mãe Beata de Iemanjá-Ilé Omiojúàrò in Nova Iguaçu, the Pequena Africa Neighborhood, and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. With each visit our participants placed an additional piece into the puzzle that is Brazil’s racialized geographies.
Racial-Spatial Formation[3] in the State of Rio de Janeiro
Three spatial themes or foci emerged during the conference: favelas, peripheries, and quilombos. In Brazil, these spatial formations, with their racial-ontological underlays, are conscribed within and characterized in relation to capital-intensive development projects. Persisting in any of these areas entails improvising life[4] amidst structural precarity. Each of these social-spatial formations was discussed and theorized by groups of residents organizing and laboring on behalf of their neighbors, comrades, and kinsfolk.
i. Favela
Favelas are primarily an urban phenomenon. Through a guided tour of the Pequena Africa neighborhood, attendees learned that the word “favela” is the name of a plant. When rural migrants made home in the hills of Rio de Janeiro, their informal developments became known by the flora that surrounded them. Today, despite the density of urban informality in Rio de Janeiro, communities are still known by this name; their residents are known as faveladas/os.[5] Though their labor and cultural production is essential to the urban economy of Rio and every other urban center in Brazil, residents of favelas are treated as though they are not meant to survive (see Vargas, 2010). Despite the surmounting challenges, the precariousness of life in favelas is challenged daily by the organizing efforts of activists like the human rights journalist Gizele Martin. Gizele, a member of the Movimento de Favelas do Rio de Janeiro, a group that has challenged the police’s militarized sweeps, occupation, and removal of residential sections of the Favela da Maré. Leading up to the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, Gizele published scores of articles exposing the gratuitous violence, extra-legal murder, and expulsions carried out by agents of the Brazilian state. In 2019, she synthesized her graduate research, and years of journalist inquiry, into Mobilização e Censura: A Luta por Liberdade de Expressão na Favela da Maré. The text has since been translated into English.[6]
ii. Quilombo
Quilombo is a name given to communities created by Brazilian fugitives from enslavement (Reis & Gomes, 2016). It is the Portuguese equivalent of marronage, the term used to refer to such communities within the U.S. and anglophone Caribbean (Anderson, 1997; Price, 1996). Similar to their U.S. counterparts, quilombolas/os create their communities in the outskirts of plantations. Though urban marronage was apparent in parts of the enslaved hemispheres (see Douglass, 1997), it was more often a rural formation (Amaral, 2017; Bledsoe, 2017; Guillen, 2021; Hall, 1985). Similar to favela residents, the quilombolas/os that joined our sessions were under the subjection and assault of the Brazilian state – regardless of which party is in power. Members of the Quilombo dos Macacos are forced to pass through naval checkpoints in order to leave and return to their homes. These engagements have frequently resulted in community members experiencing violent assaults and humiliating treatment from naval soldiers. By way of example, one of our attendees shared CCTV footage from the checkpoint showing her mother being brutally assaulted by military officers. On another occasion, she discussed how she was held at gunpoint while just a baby in her mother’s arms. Her account, alone, was evidence of years of violent encroachment by the Brazilian navy. Similarly, the Quilombo Ilha de Maré has had their nautical territory attenuated by various Brazilian state entities and private corporations (Bledsoe 2019).
During the same panel, Daiane, a leader in the Quilombo Ilha das Maré discussed a paradox of public education. Historically, the principal of the school in the quilombo has been someone from outside the community. At times, these outsiders are disrespectful of the quilombo’s cultural norms and are not attuned to its political struggles. One of the community’s internal battles has been to get the school workers to respect and acknowledge their way of life and to welcome it inside the school’s bureaucratic structure. An example Daiane gave concerned the school’s dress code. Many youths in the quilombo do not wear shoes (indoors and outdoors), even if they have them. Daiane and other parents challenged the former school master in order to ensure that children could attend school barefoot. These brief anecdotes indicate a clash of cultures between quilombolas/os (who are technically Brazilian subjects) and Brazilians who are not of quilombismo (i.e., the way of life of quilombos). It also shows that quilombolas/os must battle with various state entities to preserve their territorial integrity and way of life.
Struggles around education are present at the university level. In the early 2000s, during Lula’s first presidential term, various universities across Brazil began implementing affirmative action style programs. Such quotas became federal law in 2012 (Lei N° 12.771) under then-president Dilma Rousseff. This has resulted in youth from favelas, peripheries, and quilombos attending universities throughout the country. It has also exposed previously ignored epistemological biases among professors, departments, and universities. Though the number of students from these regions has increased, many professors are not equipped with the ideological and methodological fluidity, let alone the desire, necessary to advise students on issues of inequality beyond those that are currently accepted within the academy (e.g., class and gender). Bruno, a son of the Quilombo Ilha de Maré who recently completed his undergraduate degree in geography, discussed difficulty securing a professor who would advise him on a study of environmental racism within his quilombo.[7] We conjecture that this is one of a number of reasons why there are too few Black faculty within the contemporary Brazilian university system. If epistemological obstruction goes unimpeded, this trend will continue into the future.[8]
iii. Periphery
Peripheries are represented by a number of spatial and political formations. One example are the many towns along the densely populated outskirts of the state of Rio de Janeiro. Many of these towns were not connected via regional transport until the violent development schemes that preceded the Olympics and World Cup. Even with the installment of this much needed connective tissue, many who reside within neighborhoods across Rio de Janeiro (e.g., Pedra de Guaratiba), rely on a two-hour bus and train ride, one-way, to access a job in Rio’s city center.
A second example includes the various terreiros, the spiritual home of those who practice the Afro-Brazilian religion, candomblé. During a visit to the Terreiro de Candomblé de Mãe Beata de Iemanjá-Ilé Omiojúàrò, we learned about the spiritual practice of candomblé and the political struggles of its practitioners. Throughout Brazil, practitioners of African-based religions have been subject to violences, what some refer to as racismo religioso.[9] Babá Adailton Moreira Costa shared how many candomblecistas/os have had their spirituality attacked and their spiritual homes vandalized. These assaults, which come mainly from evangelical Christians, were acute during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro. The fact that many terreiros are located on the outskirts of cities, and are outside the dominant Catholic cultural ethos, makes them more vulnerable to political and physical attacks.
A third periphery is the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST). The MST has chapters and members across Brazil. Despite its prominence as a model of an international struggle for land, few have an opportunity to meet a member of the organization, let alone to visit their land. Our attendees were among a fortunate few who were taken by bus to Assentamento Terra Prometida. There they met with Juliana Wu Gomes and her campones comrades from Quilombo das Bruxas. We met on land they are occupying, farming, and developing in Nova Iguaçu, a town in the state of Rio de Janeiro.
Unlike faveladas/os and quilombolas/os, members of the MST have a more successful relationship with the state, one that has resulted in federal recognition and land grants that aid agriculturalists in securing lands throughout the country. Acknowledging this relationship to the state is important. During Brazil’s election season, we identified in the speech of our MST attendees a hopeful tenor about the potential ramifications of a Lula presidency. Unlike with favelas and quilombos, the peripheral status of the MST appeared to be more geo-political than racial-ontological. This is not to say that there are not those within the MST whose racial-ontological status aligns with that of quilombolas/os and many faveladas/os (i.e., those who are Black). However, in policy and in research (see Wolford, 2010) they are often lumped into the laboring class of camponeses. Conversely, faveladas/os and quilombolas/os are demonized not so much for their political inspiration (e.g., socialism) or how they propose to use the land (e.g., collectively/cooperatives), but because they exist on the land. Their entire presence, a living embodiment of a resistance to Brazil’s plantocracy, is seen as a deterrent to capital, development, and value, and the social reproduction thereof. As a result, “development” is a term that some quilombolas/os abhor and understand as a synonym for “removal,” “theft,” and “state violence.”
Last, a difference in geographical and political periphery is also observable via the cultural support the MST has in cities. On any given day in Rio a pedestrian can be seen wearing the trademark red MST hat or t-shirt with the contours of the territory of Brazil embossed in green. These urban patrons are overwhelmingly white, which may signify a racial stratification among supporters of the MST. Last, the presence of an MST storefront in Lapa, a central neighborhood known for its nightlife, increases its presence among the general populace (i.e., “Brazilians” and tourists).
Conclusion
Many more insights and issues were discussed during our week in Rio and many collaborative relationships were established. One key takeaway from this conference is that a global approach to studying and living Black geographies will require a decentering of North America as a locus of thought and repositioning of it as an interlocutor in the co-creation of critical geographical thought. Beyond decentering North America as a site of knowledge creation, the Rio meeting revealed the importance of decentering university-affiliated actors as the primary repositories of information about power relations in the world. The Global Black Geographies meeting demonstrated the importance of the theorizing and storytelling done by community-based and -oriented actors who are not officially tied to institutions of higher education but who nonetheless offer invaluable analyses of our societal structures. Thus, a commitment to creating more horizontal relationships among various actors committed to social justice across the African Diaspora was both a guiding principle and an outcome of this encounter. Moving forward, we will continue to proceed in this vein through our respective and collective work.
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Notes
[1] The Portuguese translation is Califórnia Gulag: Prisões, Crise de Capitalismo, e Abolicionismo Penal.
[2] https://global.rutgers.edu/usf-magrann-global-black-geographies-conference
[3] Clearly, this is some nod to the sociological study of Michael Omi and Howard Winant (Omi & Winant, 1986) who argued that racialization happens as a result of various institutional projects. Here, we borrow their term and engage their argument to demonstrate that spatialization/spatial projects coincide with racialization in Brazil.
[4] See AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2019) Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South.
[5] Initially coined as a derogatory term used to devalue the people who live in favelas, organizers have taken the term and given it life. For these residents, to be a favelada/do is an identity in which to take pride.
[6] The English translation is Mobilization and Censorship: The Struggle for the Freedom of Expression in the Favela da Maré.
[7] This reality brings to mind Gloria Wekker’s (2016) White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. In the acknowledgements that precede her arguments, she discusses the inability of studying race in the Netherlands and how her analyses were the product of study in the U.S.; “… after coming back to the Netherlands from Los Angeles in 1992, where I had done my PhD, looking at the Netherlands with fresh eyes regularly sent frissons of discomfort and alienation up my spine. My anthropological eyes, making the familiar world strange, received strong, new impulses to make sense of the Netherlands, where I had grown up after I was one year old… It now often struck me that interracial situations, conversations, and phenomena that would be totally unacceptable in a U.S. context would pass without any frowns or critical comments in the Netherlands” (Wekker, 2016, ix). We cannot help but wonder about the ideas that have been stymied and those that may only bear fruit as a result of studying and teaching in the U.S. But also, how the latter may deter future generations of critical scholars/educators in a country where geographic education is standard and where a number of Black graduates of geography departments teach within public schools.
[8] There is a growing body of literature on the experiences of Black students in Brazilian universities (Braga, 2019; Cirqueira, 2017; Keller Ferreira Costa & Clareth Gonçalves Reis, 2022 C.E.; Marçal Cirqueira, n.d.; Oliveira & Vasconcelos, 2024).
[9] Religious racism is further outlined in the primer, Terreiro em Luta: Caminhos para o Enfrentamento ao Racismo Religioso.